Chasing Unpaid Invoices Without Hiring a Collector: The 7/15/30-Day Dunning Playbook
A 7/15/30-day dunning cadence with aging reviews, written payment plans, and credit holds recovers overdue balances without paying an agency 15–30 percent.
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Bad Debt
Estimate, write off, and recover uncollectible accounts receivable
How to Write a Customer Credit Policy: Credit Limits, Payment Terms, and Collection Triggers
Set who gets credit, how much, and what happens when payment is late: approval tiers, credit limits, deposits, late fees, and a day-triggered collection ladder.
How to Write a Collections Policy That Gets Invoices Paid Faster Without Losing Customers
A written collections policy with a dated follow-up schedule gets invoices paid sooner — set terms, automate reminders, call at day 15, hold credit at day 45.
Bounced Checks and NSF Fees: How to Book Returned Checks, Bank Charges, and Redeposits Without Double-Counting Revenue
A bounced check reverses the deposit and reopens the receivable — book the NSF fee as its own expense and apply the redeposit to the invoice, never to revenue.
Lending Your Own Money for a Living: Licensing, Usury Caps, and Bookkeeping for Hard Money Lenders
US private lending: business-purpose loans escape licensing and usury caps only if documented so, points count as interest, and IRS Section 166 rules bad debt.
Montenegro's 2026 VAT Overhaul: How to Reclaim the Tax on Invoices You Never Got Paid
Montenegro's 2026 VAT amendments let you reclaim output VAT on uncollectible invoices — but only with a court decision, and only if you sued first.
When a Client Won't Pay: Small Claims Court for Unpaid Invoices
A 2025 Intuit QuickBooks survey found 56% of small businesses carry unpaid invoices, averaging $17,500 owed. Here is the full small claims path — demand letter, state dollar limits, naming the right defendant, evidence packet, and the levies and liens that turn a judgment into cash.
Bad Debt Reserve Accounting: Allowance Method vs. Direct Write-Off, and the Collection KPIs That Keep Your Reserve Honest
GAAP requires the allowance method while the IRS requires direct write-off under Section 166, so most accrual-basis businesses run both and reconcile the difference. This guide gives the journal entries for each, three ways to estimate the reserve (percentage of credit sales, an aging schedule, specific identification), and the five collection KPIs — DSO, CEI, current-bucket share, bad debt to sales, and average days delinquent — that reveal when a reserve has drifted from reality.
Peer-to-Peer Lending Bookkeeping: 1099-OID Interest, Netted Platform Fees, and Bad-Debt Write-Offs
P2P lending interest arrives on Form 1099-OID net of platform servicing fees, so those fees are never deducted separately; a defaulted note is usually a nonbusiness bad debt, deductible only when totally worthless and only as a short-term capital loss capped at $3,000 of ordinary income per year.
The FDCPA Won't Help You Collect That Unpaid Invoice: A Small Business Owner's B2B Collection Playbook
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act covers consumer debt collected by third parties, so it does not govern a business chasing its own overdue B2B invoices — contract law, UCC Article 2, and state unfair-practice statutes do. This guide explains the two FDCPA tests most commercial receivables fail, and gives a five-step recovery sequence from contract clauses and a follow-up cadence through demand letter, small claims or a 15–40% contingency agency, and judgment enforcement.
Rent-to-Own Store Accounting: How to Classify the Lease, Book Repossessions, and Track the Fleet
Most week-to-week rent-to-own agreements are operating leases, not credit sales — the unit stays on your books as depreciating rental inventory, each payment splits into lease revenue, bundled services, and fees, and a repossession is a status change rather than a gain or loss. Covers lease-versus-sale classification, repossession entries, doubtful-rent allowances, and the payout math that decides whether a unit makes money.
Self-Storage Facility Bookkeeping: Why 'The Manager Deposited It' Isn't the Same as 'It's Reconciled'
How to keep accurate books for a self-storage facility — reconciling manager deposits against software batch reports, applying lien-sale proceeds (which recover roughly 39 cents on the dollar) against receivables instead of booking them as income, spreading annual property taxes across months, and tracking economic occupancy and RevPAF instead of raw occupancy.